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Friday, March 4, 2011

dance process journal #7: working it

My dancers are giving so much of themselves in this demanding piece. Now the dance is really coming together, so the dancers' performance level becomes more intense and takes more out of them, and they are doing a really great job. I am suddenly feeling a tremendous responsibility to do them justice by making effective and interesting choreographic choices going forward. We've done a lot of work so far and they're dancing it so well; now it's up to me to take this dance further with the next things that I will add or change.

In each of the 2 clips in this post, we are working for about 10 minutes and incorporating all of the elements we've been working on. We've spent the past 2 rehearsals refining the details and rules of precisely HOW the dancers need to perform these different movements, and they've gotten the hang of it all pretty well by this point even though there are still a few tweaks that I want to make to this material. But already, there's a lot of good stuff happening in these videos. In the next few rehearsals with them, I'll begin to add a few more new elements to the piece.

You'll notice that we're trying out a new way of starting the dance; at the beginning, the dancers perform their own personal movement phrases, which you haven't really been able to see in our previous videos. Now that you can see those phrases more clearly, you might notice that the dancers are also using them later on in the dance at times.

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about this dance

We are creating a structured improvisation, We the People, to be performed outside at times and also in theater spaces. This dance reflects on political polarization, exploring conflict as both a personal and a shared experience as it reaches for, and raises questions about, idealism.